To explore Google Ngrams, I looked at the most recent century for trends between the words “romance” and “sex.” The 20th century was full of paradigm-shifting developments such as the two World Wars, United States Prohibition, the invention of television and the internet, progressive waves of feminist and gay rights movements, and drastic developments in medicine and science. Baring all of this in mind, I was curious to look at how literature would reflect the frequency of romance versus the frequency of sex in this century. Based on the graphs below, as I suspected, the frequency of sex in literature spiked upward very quickly. I did not however suspect that romance would decline, I hoped it would remain somewhat steady over time (but that may just be the optimist in me).

One of the biggest social revolutions in the 20th century was the sexual revolution which first surfaced in the late 1910s and moved into the Roaring Twenties after World War I. This graph is a direct reflection of that shift in the time of hot jazz, speakeasies and flapper girls. We see a subtle drop in romance from 1910 to 1920, as sex steadily climbs to 1930, where it remains somewhat constant until 1960. In the Western World, the big sexual revolution took place from 1960-1980, where we see the biggest spike in the top curve. The last increase in the sex graph is in the late 1990s, with the advent of the internet and the shift in hyper-sexualized advertising on television. With free pornography on the internet and shows like Baywatch on broadcast television, this last rise in the sex graph is not a big surprise.

*All historical references from the following wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_revolution